This invention relates to call center technology, and more generally, to contact center technology which allows different types of contacts to be serviced by the agent or other contact service employee most suited to service said contact.
Call center technology is well-known in the art and is critical to many large corporations providing service to their customer base. Call centers typically comprise a plurality of call center agents which service incoming customer inquiries, complaints, etc. A typical example of a large call center might be an airline reservation system, a credit card company, etc.
Recently, the call centers are more appropriately referred to as contact centers. This change in name is because the call centers may service more than just incoming or outgoing telephone calls. Rather, the call centers may also be involved in servicing other types of agent/customer interaction, such as web chat, e-mail, etc. Ideally, the call center architecture and logistics should provide the best possible service for all of these types of contacts.
In a large call center, there may be dozens or hundreds of different types of incoming and outgoing contacts. Additionally, complicating things more is the fact that dozens or hundreds of call center agents may have a variety of different skills. These skills permit certain agents to service particular types of contacts better or worse than other agents. In order to insure the best possible service for each contact, it is highly desirable to route contacts to agents best suited to service the particular type of need required by the particular customer that is the subject of the contact.
Some prior art systems use what is termed xe2x80x9cskills routingxe2x80x9d in an attempt to match calls with the agents best suited to service those calls. One common technique is to maintain different pools of agents depending upon the particular types of contacts expected. The contacts are then examined and routed to a pool of agents possessing those particular skills.
An example of the foregoing might be Spanish language. If a contact center anticipated that some callers require Spanish language agents with which to interact, then a Spanish pool might be set up. Calls coming in which indicate a Spanish speaking customer would be routed to the pool of Spanish speaking agents.
One problem with such a system is that even within the Spanish language speaking customers, there may be different types of services required. For example, there may be Spanish speaking customers calling up with questions about extra charges on their credit card, and there may be an additional group of Spanish speaking agents calling up to report lost or stolen cards. The groups of the Spanish speaking agents to handle these two types of calls may be different, and different agents may have different skills in this regard. In order to solve such a problem, the prior art call center technology would simply create two different pools of Spanish speaking agents. One for handling lost or stolen credit card reports, and another for inquiries regarding credit card charges.
One problem with the foregoing is that the number of pools of agents required grows rapidly as the number of different contacts grows. For example, a contact center requiring six different types of processes in ten different languages would require sixty pools of agents to handle those calls. Moreover, there is still no guaranty that the best agent will be assigned to the particular contact.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need in the art for an improved technique of contact center processing which permits the optimal match between an available agent and a contact to be serviced.
Ideally, any such implementation should be flexible to allow for the addition and removal of agents, contact types, etc. Moreover, any solution should provide maximum control over the process of matching the best agents to service contacts that they are best suited to process.
The above and other problems of the prior art are overcome and a technical advance is achieved in accordance with the present invention which relates to processing contact center contacts in a manner which maps the best available agent to any particular contact. In accordance with the technique, each type of possible contact (service), corresponds to an N-dimensional service vector. Each dimension of the N-dimensional vector space represents a different skill required to process that particular type of contact or service. The magnitude of the service vector in any dimension represents the importance of the skill represented by the dimension to the processing of the contact.
Each agent is also assigned a similar vector, the agent vector representing in each dimension that particular agent""s proficiency level in the skill represented by that dimension. The system then calculates a dot product between each agent vector and each service vector, the dot product being termed herein a skill score. Each agent is assigned a plurality of skill scores, one for each type of service that the agent can process. In a preferred embodiment, if an agent can not do at all any particular skill required for a service, then the agent may not be used for that service at all.
When a call arrives, the system immediately ascertains the type of service required. Thereafter, the call center assigns to process that contact or service the available agent with the highest skill score for that service.
The above technique insures that the agent assigned to the call is the available agent which has the best skills in the areas that are most important to process that call. An agent with high proficiency in a skill that is extremely important to a particular type of service will be preferably assigned to a particular contact over a different agent with slightly better proficiency in a skill which is much less important to the particular service. The system results in each contact being serviced by the agent whose profile (i.e., set of skills scores) shows that the agent is the best agent available to service that particular contact.
In various embodiments values assigned to each skill may vary, or the values of each dimension of the service vector and agent vector may be normalized to a common scale. Additionally, contacts may be of any type, including inbound calls, outbound, e mail, web chat, videoconferencing, or any other type of agent user interaction.